Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #45: Union Activity, CNN Ratings, Ukraine Lobbying, & Institutional Decay!

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

While Breaking Points is on vacation this week, Krystal and Saagar share content about institutional decay, union membership, CNN ratings, & Ukraine lobbying!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/Jonathan Guyer: https://www.vox.com/authors/jonathan-guyer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. All right, we got some new numbers about just what a dramatic increase we have seen in terms of grassroots labor organizing. This is per Stephen Greenhouse. This is based on some new government numbers. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board that governs union elections, they announced this morning that during the first nine months of federal fiscal year 2022, so that's October 1 through June 30th, petitions for union elections jumped 56 percent. They were up to 1,935. The comparison from the previous year, the previous amount of time was one thousand two hundred and forty. He goes on to point out that this increase comes during an absolute funding crisis for the NLRB, something that the folks that are leading that agency have been pointing to and also staffing shortages.

They've received the same appropriation, two hundred4 million from Congress, for nine straight years. So obviously every year inflation is eating into that. By adjusting for inflation, you actually come to find that the NLRB's budget over that time period since 2010 has decreased 25 percent, even as obviously the work that they have to do is far, far more. There's some more numbers here that we can point to as well. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up. So in addition to union elections being way up, unfair labor practices charges are up to 14.5 percent from 11,451 to 13,106. Now, you would kind of expect those metrics to go hand in glove because there's a lot of union, illegal union busting that goes on during union elections. But, you know, it's also you have basically one person in the entire Biden

administration who is really governing and doing an effective job. And that person is at the National Labor Relations Board in a key position, pushing back on these captive meetings that are a routine part of union busting techniques, captive audience meetings, pushing back on the modern idea that it's not just enough to get a majority of workers to sign cards. You have to go through with the election. It used to be that the onus was on corporations to prove that that wasn't a reflection of the majority will of the bargaining unit. So she's pushing back on that as well. But, you know, it really does show you that even as inflation is hurting workers, because you have this labor market with low unemployment, you have a lot more power in this worker-led movement.

And I think also that Sanders' campaign and the emphasis that he put on labor for a younger generation has made a big difference. It's very interesting. I think my greatest worry is that a lot of this is just reminiscent of the 2021 and that come recession, bargaining power just disappears. And the boss class, I mean, who rules in the time of recession? It's the bosses. And the bosses get to keep their jobs. They get to juice the stock. Labor really only has power whenever they can get jobs elsewhere. But if the Fed increasingly wants to hike unemployment, what are you going to do? There's just going to be a lot, not even scabs, like just normal people. And, you know, people can also

justify, a lot of union retaliation could be justified as cracking down or as responding to the, a lot of union retaliation can be justified as saying, oh, bad market conditions, which we've seen before. I mean, it just puts workers in a more desperate situation. Yeah, exactly. So right now, the landscape is such that people aren't really afraid so much of losing the job. So you can afford to take the risk and vote for the union election, even as, I mean, Starbucks is one example. They've closed a few stores that voted to unionize. Of course, they say it has nothing to do with that. Oh, yeah, OK. And workers can take that risk because they know there's another job at that similar pay structure that they can get.

The problem is not getting a job. It's getting a good job. So workers see that landscape and they're like, all right, we're going to take the risk. We're going to try to organize here to make this job that I have right now a better job. But, you know, this is part of what happened. Bessemer, Alabama is a perfect example with the Amazon warehouse there. You don't have a lot of other employment in that area, certainly not at that level, at that pay scale. And so it made it much harder to organize there because workers didn't feel that they had the luxury of taking the risk to buck the boss class.

So, yeah, that is the Fed policy is a direct threat to this new labor organizing, which I continue to view as the most hopeful thing happening in the entire country. I mean, we can't look to the political class to solve our problems. I think that is abundantly clear, not that you should disengage from electoral politics or any of that. But if you have what happened in the 30s and how we ended up in the New Deal era was in large part because you had this very strong, very large, very emboldened, very militant labor movement that basically forced the hand of the politicians to get them to cut the working class in on the deal. This is the only thing we have going that could potentially create a similar situation. Let's just hope it's not crushed in the cradle by the Fed's policy. Yeah. CNN's got a new strategy. They fired their terrible president. They've said that they're going to be less partisan. They're going after the middle of the road. They've got the new boss. They're trying to tamper down all of the crazy stuff in their chyrons, not overuse the breaking news banner. But inside CNN,

employees are, quote, freaking out over bad ratings. Let's put this up there on the screen. It's especially hilarious. They say that they're freaking out because the ratings are absolutely tanking. They blame, actually, the new strategy of trying to appeal to Republicans. And in a way, you know, I think they may not be wrong, which is that because their terrible ratings, which did exist, were so reliant on bashing Republicans and on trying to play to mainstream Democrats all the time. By ditching that, they already have a situation where Republicans don't trust them and are never coming back. And then they're also going to lose and betray their core audience. So they really are between a rock and a hard place.

I don't see how they could possibly come back. Like, there's no way that strategy is going to work. It's not possible. The trust is gone. This is what I've said from the beginning. I have seen how this played out before at MSNBC. They had the same idea of, we're going to bring in the NBC news people. It's going to be neutral journalism, which, again, I don't have an issue with partisan or ideological journalism. I have an issue with dishonesty and lying and carrying water for the powerful. That's the problem I have with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

And one of the sources who I guess talked to New York Post said in terms of their concerns over the strategy, the problem is we're not a neutral country. The ratings are getting worse because they are taking out all the bells and whistles. That's very telling, isn't it? CNN's ratings are as bad as local news ratings. They say new management is not freaking out, but everyone else at CNN is. They want to fix the shows first, but they don't realize the shows and ratings are connected. And this was all in response to ratings for the network hit a low not seen since the year 2000, just a few weeks ago. So,

yeah, that's what's going to happen. The ratings are going to tank because they're not giving this like feeding the infotainment beast in the way that they were. Trump is going to come back on the scene like imminently. I mean, he's going to be back in presidential contention here in mere weeks, days, months, very, very soon. And the people who lean the most into the previous model are the ones who once again are going to get the highest ratings and they're going to look at the writing and the numbers on the wall and that's the direction they're going to go in. I think you're right. I think there's inevitable that they cave, that they go in this direction. Just the current strategy is not going to work. Whoever these guys are who are like, oh, you know, it's all fake because the Biden administration is currently there. When they have their villain, the audience will come back, at least even though it's small,

like it will come back and they'll make enough money and they'll get caught up in the maelstrom and they'll be right back to square one. But luckily this show will still be here, so we'll be okay. All right. Hey guys, this is Ken Klippenstein, investigative reporter with The Intercept, with Jonathan Geyer, senior foreign policy writer for Vox. He had a very insightful story on the robust lobbying presence that Ukraine has here in Washington that I think is evident to folks in this town, but is invisible to a lot of people outside of it. Can you talk a little bit about what you found? Thanks for having me, Ken. So I've been in Washington throughout this really heinous

assault on Ukraine that Vladimir Putin has launched. And there is just an unprecedented lobbying campaign from the Ukrainians. Now, totally understandable. They want to get the right weapons in the hands of Ukrainians. But by my count, there are 24 registered lobbyists for Ukraine at the moment or Ukrainian entities. A 25th actually in response to my reporting now. So they've sent parliamentarians, human rights activists, corruption activists, pardon me, anti-corruption activists to meet with all the kind of influencers in Washington to really shape the narrative about Ukraine, the weapons they need. And the requests are incredibly specific. They want drones. They want F-16s. So part of my reporting was just looking at

what is Ukraine asking for and who's asking. The most interesting or kind of quirky thing is most recently, Ukraine sent two fighter jet pilots to Washington to meet with reporters, to meet with Sean Penn, to go on TV. And I don't know. I mean, we are the country that made Top Gun twice. I was going to say, fighter jet pilots. It's a compelling narrative. And I think the notion was, you know, the influencers of Washington were getting bored of hearing from politicians from Ukraine. They wanted to hear from jet fighters on the front line. So I had the pleasure of having dinner with two of these fighter pilots.

But what was a little murky was the PR agency that was hosting them was not officially registered to lobby for Ukraine. We have something called FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act. You have to register. experts have told me is that in the lead up to the war this fall, there were about 10,000 contacts made between Ukrainian lobbyists and folks in Washington in the US. And just to give folks a sense of proportion here, that is greater than the lobbying you see from states like Saudi Arabia, which itself has an extremely robust lobbying process. And you guys at The Intercept have done a huge amount of reporting on this. It's super interesting. And we won't get the new numbers about since the February invasion. That's what's fascinating to me about that story.

So when you say 10,000 contacts with journalists, members of Congress, think tanks, that's prior to the invasion, correct? Exactly. So we don't even know what it is yet because it hasn't been reported yet, what the figures are now. Exactly. And one of the really interesting things is we have about 2,000 foreign agents registered to lobby on behalf of foreign countries, foreign entities in the U.S. I spoke with Department of Justice officials. There's just over a dozen Department of Justice officials monitoring this whole area, which— All foreign lobbying. It comes down to 12 guys and a couple interns. That's what amazed me, that you were able to get that on record from the Justice Department, the figures, because I would always assume they didn't have the resources they needed,

as the Justice Department doesn't in many respects. But 12 for a country like ours, where it's probably going to be the most intensely lobbied government on the earth. And I would say, look, none of this is illegal if you're registered. Right. FARA doesn't regulate free speech. Speech is still free. We're the United States. And we're a powerful country.

We're giving this staggering amount of military aid to Ukraine. And what my reporting was trying to do is just shed light on what are the sources of influence, part of this Ukrainian campaign. What are the levers being pulled? And I don't think we yet have the complete picture. So in your story, you describe attending this fancy dinner where these two jet pilots who, you know, go by their call signs. Juice and Moonfish. Juice and Moonfish. Very romantic. And so what ends up happening after you look up this organization that organized this fancy

dinner that a bunch of other journalists attended, and you see if they registered under Farah. So they haven't registered as far as I could tell. So I called up their founder, their CEO. I asked them if they were going to register for working on Ukraine. The founder says, hold on, let me call you right back. And, you know, as I say in the story, at advice of her counsel, she decided to register. I haven't seen that filing yet, but I'm sure it's due every day, any day now. So that number changed by one, the, whatever the number is now. I would guess so. Yeah, exactly. That's incredible. And that

kind of speaks to how informally this law sort of works in my experience. Like how much discretion, that's another interesting quote that you managed to get in this story was the Justice Department just openly saying, you know, if the country that an individual is lobbying or a group is lobbying on behalf of is an adversary nation or a national security concern, we're going to bring more resources or more concern to bear in terms of getting them to register and being concerned. And that's kind of interesting to me because on the one hand, you know, that kind of makes sense. You know, the Chinese, the Russians are going to have, you know, potentially more malevolent interests in terms of what's going on in the United States. But on the other hand, that discretion is concerning to me just because, to give you an example, I know an army officer

that was advising a group, a political group in Lebanon, advising them on how to pursue diplomatic channels to try to, this was like years ago, I don't remember exactly what the conflict was. And he told me that his lawyer advised him, he says, you should really register under Farah. And he said, well, why? I'm not taking direction from them. I'm telling them like how you try to, you know, go through the international system to try to pursue a diplomatic solution to whatever the problem was at the time. And he said, well, you know, this party in Lebanon is not liked by the United States. And so there's going to be more risk that they're going to, you know, come after you and say, hey, you have to register or, you know, fine you or something. And so that discretion,

you know, it doesn't necessarily mean, I mean, you know, if you're defending something horrible, it's one thing. But I would imagine there are cases where you could be pursuing something that's not necessarily malevolent. And then, you know, if it's just one of these countries that the U.S. is not on good terms with that, you know, you're going to be, you know, you're going to be more anxious about what could happen. Well, this law, I mean, yes, it requires the affirmative kind of reporting of foreign lobbying agents. But it's also maybe just not really suited for 2022. This is a 1938 law. It doesn't really work for tweets or Facebook posts or all the other forms of media that didn't exist when this was meant to kind of identify Nazi or Soviet propaganda. Right. And

this was what, 1936? 1938. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, there were only about seven prosecutions under this law until the mid 2000s. So over 50 years, about 70 people got in trouble for violating Farah. Then in the Trump era, all these people from his inner circle are working. Michael Flynn working for the Turks. Manafort working for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. All this stuff unregistered, getting into huge trouble. So now it's a headline-making law and issue, but really it's pretty obscure. And I was just glad to give it a little bit more attention. Yeah. So after the case of Manafort, who I believe was prosecuted in relation to Farah, was it? Did you find that, has there been a change in terms of compliance? Because my understanding

is that Farah has always been something that there's not been very much compliance with. Well, people are definitely thinking about it more more. I guess the lawyers I spoke to would say that's probably a good thing. I think the funniest dynamic here, I don't know if it's so funny, haha, but groups that were lobbying for Russian interests that got sanctioned. Some of the major PR shops in Washington were lobbying for a Russian bank to evade sanctions or stuff like that. Then after the invasion in February, all the sanctions get thrown on Russia.

It's really difficult to work for Russian entities. And then what happens? A lot of these groups are now doing pro bono work for Ukrainian entities as a way to kind of shore up their public image. Interesting. You saw that after the Khashoggi murder, a number of prominent lobby shops dropped him. They ended up, many of them, going back to, a number of prominent lobby shops dropped him. They ended up,

many of them going back to working on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But at the time, they dropped him. So it's interesting that you see this sort of response to the political environment and how that comes through to the conduct of these lobbying shops. Yeah, I mean, I love reading through these FARA filings. You get them a little bit of a lag, but you can see every journalist they've called, these foreign agents. You know, my name appears on there because I'm seeking comment from various foreign agents at various times, any briefing they hold. And I just think there needs to be a lot more transparency about this and a lot more clarity

because look, we are giving this, as the United States, a tremendous amount of money to Ukraine, a tremendous amount of weapons. They have corruption problems. We have corruption problems. It would be great for there to be a lot more transparency about who's lobbying for what and when and how that's influencing U.S. policy. Yeah. And talking to people that work in that space, attorneys and former DOJ officials, I'm sort

of sympathetic to the challenges of what, because the law, as you say, is so vague. Implementation, part of the problem is lack of resources as it always is. But another part is, like you said, this was a 1938 law and something that, you know, most of the cases brought against people, I think were during the Cold War. You know, we've got a different media landscape since then. We've got something called the internet. We have cable TV. Things are a little different now. Oh, yeah. There's this hilarious thing where you're supposed to have a conspicuous statement if you're a foreign lobbyist.

So, you know, so-and-so is lobbying on behalf of the presidency of Ukraine. It's about a three-sentence statement. How are you going to add that onto a tweet or a post or a, you know, doesn't really make sense in our, you know, 280-character world. Exactly. Okay, well, we're going to leave it there. Jonathan, where can people find your work? Vox.com. Look out for my name, Jonathan Geyer. I'm writing about Biden and the world. All right. Thanks very much for joining us for this edition of Breaking Points Intercept Edition. Hey there, my name is James Lee. Welcome to another segment of 5149 on Breaking Points. Today, I want to take a moment to reflect about why all of our major institutions are in shambles.

To help set the stage for today's conversation, let's examine a recent Gallup poll measuring Americans' confidence in major U.S. institutions from 2021 to 2022. Taking a look at this graphic, the only two institutions with a majority of respondents answering a great deal or quite a lot of confidence are small businesses and the military. Everything else is underwater. The medical system, 38% confidence. Big tech, 26%. The Supreme Court, 25%. A big drop there, no surprise, based on recent events. The presidency, 23%. TV news, 11%. Congress, 7%.

Wow. Now, today I want to explore one of the reasons why I think this is the case. Institutions have shown signs of decay for decades, and I don't mean to keep relitigating the topic of COVID-19, but I do think the coronavirus pandemic really stressed our institutions to the breaking point. The analogy I like to use is that it's kind of like a piece of metal that's been damaged, a support beam or something like that, that's been fatiguing for years and years, finally, it buckles under a prolonged trauma. I'll give you a specific example. Last month, former COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx appeared before a select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis to testify on former President Donald Trump's response to the pandemic. And she said something pretty revealing. When the government told us that the

vaccinated couldn't transmit it, was that a lie or was that a guess? I think it was hope that the vaccine would work in that way. And that's why I think scientists and public health leaders always have to be at the table, being very clear what we know and what we don't know. This is important for the country to know. So when I asked the question, when the government told us that the vaccinated couldn't get it, and I asked you if it was a guess or a lie, you said you don't know. You said you think it was hope. So what we do know is it wasn't the truth. So they were either guessing, lying, or hoping and communicating that information to the citizens of this country. We knew early on in January of 2021 and late December of 2020

that reinfection was occurring after natural infection. Once you see that, and I want to make it clear to you all and to anyone that is listening, this is not measles, mumps, and rubella. Those vaccines produce long-term immunity and can create herd immunity. I just want to interrupt for a second, Dr. Bursch. You said something important.

You said in early 2021, January 2021, you knew that people who had been vaccinated could be reinfected. All I know is there was evidence from the global pandemic that natural reinfection was occurring. And since the vaccine was based on natural immunity, you cannot make the conclusion that the vaccine will do better than natural infection. So I'll come back to the hope versus a guess versus a lie issue in just a second. But the fact is, although they knew that COVID-19 reinfection was occurring even before the mass rollout of the vaccine, that's obviously not the information they chose to convey to the American public. And here are a couple of clips from President Biden and Dr. Fauci to remind you of the messaging they chose instead throughout much of 2021. This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, the unvaccinated, not the

vaccinated, the unvaccinated. That's the problem. And so everybody talks about freedom and not to have a shot or have a test. Well, guess what? So how about patriotism? How about making sure that you're vaccinated so you do not spread the disease to anybody else. The fact is, this is one of the encouraging aspects about the efficacy of the vaccine. It'll lead to protect you completely against infection. If you do get infected, the chances are that you're going to be without symptoms and the chances are very likely that you'll not be able to transmit it to other people. Pandemic of the unvaccinated. If you're vaccinated, you won't transmit the virus. These are all things we were told by our government and the

legacy media throughout all of 2021. And yes, I understand that the official guidance and establishment sanctioned narrative have since changed, maybe because it became impossible to deny that vaccines cannot stop the spread of COVID-19. But what Dr. Birx's testimony confirmed was that the official guidance was not based on any kind of science. It was not necessarily even new information that resulted in a shift of the official guidance and narrative. It was actually information they knew all along but chose to suppress. But what reason? Was it hope? A guess? A deliberate lie? We don't really know.

And to me, it doesn't necessarily even matter because that's only half of the story here in terms of why Americans have no confidence in any of our major institutions. Quoting a Reuters article from July of last year, Facebook is not doing enough to stop the spread of false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at the time, part of a new administration pushback on misinformation in the United States. Now, I know that big tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are

all independent theoretically, and the White House obviously can't enforce certain censorship policies onto these companies. But it's hard not to argue that the Biden administration is closely tied to a lot of these social media companies. Taking a look at Facebook's content guidelines, quote, under our community standards, we remove misinformation during public health emergencies when public health authorities conclude that the information is false. Twitter, their misinformation policy states that the platform will flag, quote, false or misleading information that misrepresent the protective effect of vaccines and to make claims contrary to health authorities. YouTube's vaccine misinformation policy states that they will remove videos that, quote, contradicts local health authorities or the WHO's guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.

I just want to point out the common thread, which is when public health authorities conclude the information is false or claims contrary to health authorities, videos that contradict health authorities guidelines. So basically, none of the most popular social media platforms allowed for conversations, discussions, or opinions about vaccines that contradicted or deviated from whatever guidance that was explicitly endorsed by public health authorities. They were essentially given carte blanche over deciding what is and what isn't misinformation.

If they concluded the information to be false, then it must be false. Nevermind Dr. Fauci's many quote unquote noble lies in the past two years about mask wearing, what constitutes herd immunity, and whether or not the US funded gain of function research in China. I understand that this is a sensitive issue mask wearing, what constitutes herd immunity, and whether or not the U.S. funded gain-of-function research in China. I understand that this is a sensitive issue and that there were a lot of

people making nefarious claims about COVID-19 and the vaccine. And I do think that social media certainly makes things worse in those cases by amplifying their voices. But I also think that there were a lot of other people searching for the truth so they can make an educated decision. And in the past, social media has democratized the distribution of media or information that would have otherwise been unavailable. But this time around, we weren't allowed to have that discussion on public forums, which I think could actually have the unintended consequence of further weakening our already ailing institutions. NYU professor Jonathan Haidt spoke to this point in a recent interview with Radio New Zealand, saying, quote, When critics go silent, the institution gets stupid. Now, Haidt, he's founded an organization called the Heterodox Academy, which aims to foster free institutional debate.

He continues by saying that, quote, We're scientists and social scientists, and we know how hard it is to find the truth. When you have a bunch of people with PhDs and expertise in an area trying to study something, especially complex social policy, half the time we're going to get it wrong, and it's really hard to find the truth. And if people are afraid to dissent, then you're guaranteed to not find it. And you're going to be wrong about almost everything. Now, this ethos is specifically aimed towards debates within academia, but I think it rings true for institutions throughout American life. My takeaway is that our institutions are struggling not because of nefarious online actors, Russian bots, and the

like seeking to cause chaos, although admittedly those situations definitely do exist, but rather I think our institutions are rotting from the inside out because of a pattern of deliberate decisions made to obfuscate the truth from the public and then suppressing discussion for the sake of maintaining control over the narrative. The reason why this is so damaging is because when the public inevitably finds out the truth, this type of repeated behavior conditions us to question the very institutions, the government, the media, the public health system, etc., the institutions that are fundamental to maintaining our democracy and holding our country together. The problem that I've laid out here today with regards to COVID began actually much earlier, going all the way back to Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers probably seem like ancient history at this point, but they do reveal deep institutional lies that were designed not only to deceive the American public, but also control media narratives. Then when you have events like Watergate, Iran-Contra, the 2000 election, Iraq WMDs, the 2008 recession, along with so many promises being broken along the way, I think distrust then becomes the norm. And besides these defining institutional scandals of the past, there are also quieter reasons why distrust has collapsed. I think on a daily level, the corruption, the fraud, coercion, deception, and stagnation within U.S. institutions prevents them from upholding their bargain with the American people.

In societies dictated by social contracts between institutions formed to write the rules and run society, legitimacy stems from those institutions delivering when asked to function for the American people. When those social contracts break down across politics, economics, culture, media, etc., distrust comes pretty naturally from there. I think the example from the COVID-19 pandemic that we discussed today was just a glaring example that removed any and all doubts. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's discussion about the unfortunate state of our crumbling institutions and found it to be helpful.

If you want more videos like this, please check out my channel, 5149 with James Lee, where I release weekly videos relating to the intersection of business, politics, and society. The link will be in the description below. And of course, subscribe to Breaking Points. And thank you so much for your time today.

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